Re: grep-2.5.1a egrep/fgrep PATH problem

[Bob Proulx]

Of course all of this has been discussed previously.  I was pretty
sure the list concensus was to revert to binaries for the individual
programs.  Is there anything really wrong with doing that?  It seems
the best solution.

Charles Levert wrote:
> How about this, then?
> 
> We store the grep executable as
> 
>    /usr/libexec/grep/2.5.2/i686-pc-linux-gnu/grep

The reason for the GNU standard that programs don't change their
behavior when renamed is so that people can rename them.  But what
this is doing is splitting the program into two parts and saying,
okay, you can rename that (trivial) part but not this other part.
This is worse than having the program behavior depend upon its name
because now added complexity has been required to "install" the
program into the system in order to run it.

Sure this can be installed anywhere and users can hack on the wrapper
script to point to that location.  But is that really needed?  Is this
really a good thing for the users?

I personally don't like it.  The reason why is that a simple command
like grep is suddenly becoming something that must be "installed" to
work.  Someone copies the /bin/grep file from one host to another
(usually on a commercial system where it has been added on one machine
but they find they want it on another) and runs it and then finds they
don't really have the binary at all.  I think for complex systems such
as an MTA one would expect that it would need to be installed in order
to work.  But grep has always been a standalone program not needing a
complex installation.  I hate to see it go that way.

Bob